Benchmarking Open-Source Static 3D Mesh Codecs for Immersive Media Interactive Live Streaming

Abstract

This work provides a systematic understanding of the requirements of live 3D mesh coding, targeting (tele-)immersive media streaming applications. We thoroughly benchmark in rate-distortion and runtime performance terms, four static 3D mesh coding solutions that are openly available. Apart from mesh geometry and connectivity, our analysis includes experiments for compressing vertex normals and attributes, something scarcely found in literature. Additionally, we provide a theoretical model of the tele-immersion pipeline that calculates its expected frame-rate, as well as lower and upper bounds for its end-to-end latency. In order to obtain these measures, the theoretical model takes into account the compression performance of the codecs and some indicative network conditions. Based on the results we obtained through our codec benchmarking, we used our theoretical model to calculate and provide concrete measures for these tele-immersion pipeline's metrics and discuss on the optimal codec choice depending on the network setup. This offers deep insight into the available solutions and paves the way for future research.